INTRODUCTION

The practice of a healer, therapist, teacher, or any helping professional should be directed toward his or herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people.

—THICH NHAT HANH¹

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not its idea of you.

—JAMES BALDWIN²

To be ratchetdemic is to achieve a state of consciousness that allows one to operate in the world having mind, body, and spirit activated, validated, and whole without distortion or concession as one acquires all essential knowledge—academic knowledge, knowledge of self, knowledge of how to navigate one’s immediate surroundings, knowledge of the systems in which one is embedded (particularly those that are structured to disempower), and knowledge of the world. Achieving this state of consciousness is the true mark of being educated, and both getting to that point and helping youth get to that point are the chief responsibilities of the educator.

Imagine a school system that is designed for students’ complete self-actualization and how young people would emerge from their time within such a school system—fully aware of their greatness and infinite potential. Our nation’s education system professes to improve the learning of the whole child, which includes mind, body, and spirit, but it chiefly concerns itself with educating the mind. It does so not by cultivating or elevating the mind but by attempting to control and manipulate it to maintain systems that devalue certain people and their words, thoughts, actions, and behaviors and elevate others. Our schools, particularly for Black children, function to fill the mind, police the body, and cast away the spirit. To be ratchetdemic is to have no role in starving part of the self in pursuit of academic knowledge. It is a recognition that any education that is disconnected from helping students understand themselves and the power structures that influence their worlds and how these structures operate to stifle or obfuscate young people’s purpose is not education at all. To hold ratchetdemic knowledge is to see the limits of institutional knowledge and recognize that true knowledge of self, society, and the world exists when we open our eyes to the genius that each and every student possesses.

The ratchetdemic educator understands that true knowledge is not given; it is discovered. By designing learning environments and curricula to awaken curiosity, hard work, and determination, the ratchetdemic educator creates conditions that allow young people to make their own discoveries. Ratchetdemic educators recognize that the best types of learning contexts vary from the norm in terms of how loud the classroom gets or how unstructured it may appear. The ideal learning environments reengage parts of the self that have been deactivated in the pursuit of book knowledge. Most importantly, ratchetdemic educators recognize that they must pursue their own work toward freedom from the constraints of institutional structures and model this pursuit for students.

Students must see you struggle with the tension between what is expected of you and what is the right thing to do. This does not mean that ratchetdemic educators do not understand or teach academic content. In fact, they have to have more command of the content they are delivering than the educator who just teaches what they are given. Ratchetdemic educators are expert in content knowledge but are not constrained by it. They deliver content in a way that has contextual value and uplifts the student.

The concept behind being ratchetdemic has always existed. It has always been the hidden ingredient in the work of those in the field of education who challenge the status quo and reimagine the way that power is distributed in this country and across the world.

It is in the education theories of hundreds of scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings and Paulo Freire. However, it is more than words and theory. It is in the embodiment of them. When you hear recordings of Freire speaking or see Ladson-Billings teach, there is a ratchetdemic quality or authenticity that only becomes evident in their presentation—their voice inflections, their rawness, their passion, their fervor, their taking up space and claiming power even in powerful places. Power, in its most simple form, is the ability to do something that one wants to do and having the agency to act upon it. For the ratchetdemic educator and student, being ratchetdemic means exercising power through the ability to act in the way that feels most comfortable and authentic in the pursuit and expression of the knowledge. Power is also the capacity and the ability to direct or influence the actions and behavior of self and others. Being ratchetdemic is about pushing the boundaries of what is normal within schools to reflect the needs of groups of people who have been denied power. It is claiming the right to develop and express one’s true genius and live as one’s true self. I suggest that formal education, at its core, is about the distribution of information, tools, and resources for the sake of gaining or maintaining power within a particular social structure. Some are able to translate what they have received in schools into false power in the form of positions of authority or control within institutions. Others are burdened by what they have received in school because it has taught them to hide and inevitably lose the power they innately possess.

This is the season for educators of all types and in all disciplines to claim power and teach youth to do the same. It is the season to be game shifters and norm shatterers. In an era in which schools perpetually assault those who society has pushed to the margins, the need for the philosophy of being ratchetdemic has become more urgent than ever before. We have not seen such blatant opposition to Black folks pursuing power and wholeness since Jim Crow laws mandated segregation and endorsed a state-sanctioned devaluing of Black life.

In that era, there was a fear of educated Black folks and a villainizing of those who taught them. People with power were simply not going to let Black kids in White schools and let them flourish. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, American society got a taste of Blackness in (political) power. The aftertaste has left bitterness in the throat of the power structure across the country. In response, it has spit out the most egregious hate in speech, tweet, practice, and policy. The Obama-era model of gaining power with/through institutional position came with a required gentility that did not do much for the agency of marginalized folks. Civility and respectability did not distribute power to those rendered powerless across industries and institutions for generations. In fact, political institutional power blinded many people to the denial of full power to Black folks everywhere and Black youth in schools. This is not to say that the presence of a Black family in the White House did not provide inspiration and motivation to Black people. It is to acknowledge that under an administration of civility and appropriateness, there were certain norms around the denial of agency that were maintained. Teachers who signed up to change the lives of Black and other minoritized children were quietly being assaulted by accountability checklists, empty standards, and pressure to conform to the status quo. Folks who were presenting alternative models to existing schools that doubled down on the poor pedagogy that stifles the spirit of the ratchetdemic thrived. An agenda of imposing blind conformity to the norms of institutions and forcing segments of the population to accept a brokenness of self and spirit were hidden under calls for high academic expectations.

The youth pushed back against this agenda in classrooms every day. They told us the testing was too much and the strict adherence to curriculum that made no space for them was suffocating. Some educators stood with them. Those who stood and still stand in staunch opposition to this flawed notion of what it means to be academically successful remain under assault. Those who possess an intellect deep enough to see through the façade of academic success that masks the inadequacies of the current system to meet the needs of Black folks are made to feel like they are crazy. Because our youth hold power in their truth and inspire others when they share it, they are often silenced and their truth is denied. What they have to say about how this system doesn’t work is erased from the conversation about schools. They are framed as less than, inadequate, not intellectual or academic because of the fervor with which they deliver their message and not the truth within it. They reclaim power by embodying a ratchetdemic identity, one in which there is no role to play other than being one’s authentic self, because that is all one truly has. It is the season to have all of who one is on display. It is the time to be all the beautiful things that one is at once. It is the time to be loud and thoughtful and angry and loving and ratchet and academic with fire in the belly and a desire to push the world to reimagine how they see us and others like us. It is the time to create space for the people we rarely get the gift of hearing from within institutions like schools. If given the platforms they deserve or the room to breathe and fully be, the silenced could empower so many to reclaim power and embrace their full academic and intellectual selves.

In this book, I honor the traditions of Black women who have always understood the power of holding on to a core identity that is rooted in community while displaying an intellectual heft that matches that of anyone who is credentialed or degreed. I think of women who not only embody this phenomenon but also those who write and speak about this phenomenon. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s work has consistently highlighted Black folks who were not seen as having value or whose stories had been stripped of complexity but who exhibited excellence in fields that range from politics to medicine with a certain ratchetdemic approach to being in the world. When she writes of the politics of respectability adopted by Black women from the late 1800s to 1920, Higginbotham describes women who created certain rules of engagement for operating in a world that saw them as less than because of their gender and race.³ She describes women who saw an erasure of certain parts of themselves as a necessary endeavor for gaining social and political change. She also writes about Black women like Septima Clark, who was the quintessential ratchetdemic educator.

Septima Clark’s father was born into slavery. Her mother was raised in Haiti and moved to South Carolina when she married Septima’s father. Her mother was insistent that her children have a good life and be accepted by society. Septima’s mother wanted the best for her children and translated that desire, for them to be more than their circumstances would allow, into an obsession with respectability, especially for her daughters. This led her to focus on getting Septima the best education possible but also ensuring that neither Septima nor her siblings behaved in a way that could be construed as inappropriate. Speaking too loudly or eating in the street was barred. Her children had to always be well put together, and the girls had to be ladylike in all ways at all times. In response, Septima pushed back against her mother’s requests for her to be subdued in her interactions with the world. She married down in terms of social status, married up in terms of love. She realized even then that down was where the soil was, and for anything to grow, you go first to the soil. I argue that the soil is where the ratchet is. The academic is where the book knowledge is. For the world to have any true meaning, both have to be taken care of.

Septima Clark’s ratchetdemic educator identity is captured most powerfully in one of the quotes she is most recognized for: I have a great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.⁴ The chaos that she speaks of is not just random confusion but a disruption of the norm or status quo. Septima Clark saw the power that comes with interrupting norms, particularly those that exist simply because they stifle creativity and self-expression. Septima Clark’s life and work show us what it means to be a ratchetdemic educator. She was a teacher in the traditional sense of having a classroom and a role to teach students subjects and in her mission to transform the lives of her students by meeting them where they were and creating a context in which they felt compelled to become part of the political process. She taught them their rights and made them aware of how they had been robbed of them, even as they were taught how to become literate. Her citizenship schools for adult learners taught illiterate adults how to read and write, but as Katherine Charron describes, the schools Septima Clark started also provided a space in which adult African Americans could begin to dismantle their internalized sense of White supremacy [and] the feeling that white is right.⁵

In the spirit of Septima Clark, the ratchetdemic educator asks, What piece of this system is doing violence to my mind, body, and spirit, and what chaos can I bring to this space so that my students do not have to undergo the same violence that I had grown accustomed to or adjusted to? Martin Luther King Jr., in a powerful speech at UCLA in 1965, describes the unfortunate reality that the world often adjusts itself to certain types of injustice. The ratchetdemic educator does not become adjusted. In fact, our work is to be what MLK described as the creatively maladjusted.⁶ At one point, MLK called for the start of a new organization called the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. The organization was intended to bring together a critical mass of people who refuse to be held captive by institutional norms or acquiesce to the whims of those who hold and wield power. Its mission was to ensure that the creativity and authenticity of marginalized folks were used to disrupt systems that force them to adjust to systems that enact violence on them. I suggest that a cadre of educators who recognize that schools are designed to foster the brokenness of Black folks and who respond to this reality by teaching and being ratchetdemic are the ones who can see this mission to fruition.

On the rare occasion that we see someone embody a ratchetdemic identity, even if we don’t know how to name what we are seeing, we revere them. We look to them as heroes of sorts because of the manner in which they navigate multiple worlds with ease in a way that is beyond code switching and closer to just existing. I think of attorney and political commentator Angela Rye, who describes her approach to existing in the world as sophista-ratchet, and Professor Michael Eric Dyson, who assumes a down-home Black preacher identity as he waxes poetic about topics that range from politics to pop culture. I see those who use complex academic terms and urban vernacular interchangeably and effortlessly. We look at these folks as anomalies who happened to have stumbled into their brilliance. However, I suggest that they resonate with us because there are elements of their genius in all of us. Their methods of engagement are essential for all of us. Angela Rye and Michael Eric Dyson speak and operate with a certain conviction that is complemented by their academic credentials and professional position. The self that they present is one that all educators must embody and model for young people. They are ratchetdemic educators. They connect with their audiences, deliver new information, resonate authentically, and speak truth to power.

In this book, I extend the genius of Patricia Hill Collins on intersectionality and Black feminist thought and bring it to schools, schooling, and their flawed ideas about academic excellence.⁷ I am inspired by Brittney Cooper’s work on antirespectability as protest and Treva Lindsey’s work articulating the lived experiences of New Negro womanhood in Washington, DC, in the late nineteenth century. I have learned from Professor Terri Watson from the City College of New York and her embracing of her Harlem identity in her studies of education and from the radical love expressed by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz in her book Love from the Vortex. I offer that these works should be brought to teachers and young people as a means to model for them that there are different ways to exist in the world. The movements that these sisters spearhead and the ideas that they articulate must be brought to classrooms and be a part of teaching and learning. The work is directly inspired by a 1971 conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin—both Black intellectual icons—and a dialogue they had in which they discuss everything from love to politics while exuding a certain Black cool that was as palpable as it was intangible.⁸ The subtle use of slang, voices rising in disagreement, the brilliant analysis of the conditions within communities, overall high intellect, and love expressed throughout the conversation are what ratchetdemic educators do. Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin were teaching. They were comfortable in their own skin, free in their critique of society and each other, and held each other to the highest expectations. Ratchetdemic educators in classrooms do the same. They hold young people to the highest of expectations academically while holding society to the highest of expectations in accepting the genius of young people in whatever form it comes.

To be ratchetdemic is to get to a place where we unapologetically love ourselves as educators, to love and accept young people however they show up to school, and to get young people to fully love themselves. The ratchetdemic educator is not poisoned by public opinion or the lack of value assigned to teaching. They recognize that for any human being to reach the height of their potential and tap into the pinnacle of their greatness, they must first become a K–12 educator. It is in this role that your inner genius is awakened and most accessible to you. For those who choose teaching as a career, their genius is awakened every day of their professional lives. The daily practice of ingenuity, flexibility, creativity, and patience is the formula for awakening genius. For those who once taught, even after they no longer work every day in classrooms, the recognition of and reverence for the genius of teaching allows them to access their genius in their present work. Teaching is about being in touch with the youth and the communities they are from and being humble enough to learn from them as you engage in your work. The ratchetdemic educator does this continually and develops a certain genius that is unparalleled as a result. With this being said, it is absolutely possible to take a job to teach and never activate your genius. The genius of teaching is reserved for those who don’t hide behind the title or credential and instead take on the actions required to authentically connect with students and their communities.

This book is about an age-old sentiment/approach not yet fully brought to the fore in education, and yet, it is a capturing of the spirit of the times. While it was designed with the teacher and the student in mind, there are lessons here for anyone interested in how schools have robbed the gifted among us of faith, love, discernment, intuition, and power. It is about how we may restore these valuable gifts to those who were born into them but lost them on the course to being educated. It is about the hidden flaws of the education system and how it has been designed to harm the most vulnerable young people. This book is built from the sensemaking of narratives that I have heard from those who have been most affected by schools and schooling. It is a way of looking at self and the world that creates a way forward for frustrated young people in classrooms and those who teach them. It is information that has come to me from dozens of everyday people from a variety of professions. I have gained insight from activists, artists, bus drivers, busboys, cabbies, and cleaners, who shared their truths about how they have been broken by a system that was marketed to them as the way out of their present conditions only to place them in even worse ones.

Engaging in and with these truths has been hard. As an education researcher who has been charged with bringing these truths to light, I’ve had to keep quiet, listen, and then prepare to be a vessel for words and emotions that are larger than myself. This book is for and from parents, pedagogues, principals, preachers, advocates, activists, and academics. I italicize the word academics because my conversations with people within communities who do not have the credentials or degrees that are perceived to be requirements for being an academic have provided me with more powerful insight on schools and the negative effects of contemporary schooling than any professor or pundit positioned or presented as an academic. This book is for the millions of folks who talk about education with passion and have learned to wield and swing (s)words like equity, cultural relevance, and even anti-racism at educational injustice without recognizing that their wild swinging often fans the flames of a hidden and more insidious injustice than what they profess to be against. Being ratchetdemic is allowing our swords to do what they were designed to do: to bring the culture of young people to the fore and allow them to leverage their natural genius to overcome the oppression perpetuated by schools and schooling. It is about us taking a critical look at ourselves and how we have been shaped by institutions that rob us of our joy and passion while selling us a version of education that doesn’t awaken the soul. It is about uncovering and recovering. Uncovering truth and recovering soul. Uncovering the reality that what we blindly pursue is useless. Test scores matter but they don’t matter more than joy. Curriculum matters but not if it erases the student and kills their passion. This work is about recovering the authentic self that reaches the authentic student.

CHAPTER 1

DR. WHITE

In every moment, each individual part must be what it is, because all others are what they are and you could not remove a single grain of sand from its place, without thereby, although perhaps imperceptibly to you, altering something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.

—JOHANN G. FICHTE, THE VOCATION OF MAN¹

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.

— DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.

— ISAIAH 59:14

The years 2020 and 2021 were filled with both profound challenge and divine revelation. Like many who work with Black folks, poor folks, and others who have been pushed to the margins of society, I emerged from these years deeply aware that what we, as a nation and as a world, are far from where MLK dreamed we could be. The pandemics of coronavirus and state-sanctioned violence fell squarely on the shoulders of Black folks—and, in particular, Black children. They witnessed death in multiple forms and experienced it in unimaginable ways. They saw people they knew succumb to a horrific disease. They saw videos of people with skin like theirs being assaulted and assassinated by people whom they were taught all their lives to trust. Most importantly, they experienced the death of their innocence as virtues they believed in, like justice and equity, devolved into hypocrisy and fallacy.

As all of this was happening, the world kept going. Schools went back and forth between in-person and online instruction with no true investment in young people or concern for their teachers. Institutions did not consider that some young people were trying to sort through death and destruction in ways that others could not even fathom. Schools moved along in a pursuit of normal without considering the trauma our children carried before the pandemic—let alone during and after it. The world continues to chase normal by ignoring the pain of many while justifying that callousness by highlighting the successes of a few. And here we are, reeling from a global pandemic, while aiming to teach like nothing ever happened. We are teaching like pain and death aren’t things that warrant our attention in classrooms, hiding inequity and injustice under the cloak of normal.

If this world is to be what MLK dreamt it to be, where equality is accepted as truth, and difference and experience are both welcomed and embraced, we must look at sameness and uniformity as the chief enemy of any progressive society. If everybody is trying to be like somebody they are not, and if the system of education is hell-bent on making everyone into a version of excellence that is about sameness, we will remain as we are, swimming in inequity, struggling to make connections with young people and their communities, paying lip service to social justice and cultural relevance, and maintaining the status quo. To move forward, we must accept that schools have become the chief site for a failed experiment in the socialization of Black folks, whose entire existence in American integrated schools has been about learning to behave in ways that are acceptable to White societal norms, even at the expense of their healing and their humanity. Schooling has always been about the upholding of White middle-class ideals that even White folks, who largely benefit from the enterprise, cannot fully align themselves to. The chief goals for us all must be not only to highlight these unsaid truths about schools and reject them by saying out loud how we have been harmed by them and begin the movement toward healing by being our authentic selves.

Unfortunately, schools assault authenticity just as fervently as they embrace socialization. It’s not just that everyone is being forced to look, act, talk, and move in similar ways through schools; it is that teachers and their students are being stigmatized for stepping out of roles that have been defined for them. In many urban schools, this process is overt. There are schools where teachers who don’t follow the curriculum or who choose not to follow established scripts about how to teach are threatened. Letters are placed in files and warnings about firings are part of the everyday discourse. Students who interrupt instruction that stems from scripted teaching are also penalized.